1. Field
The present disclosure is directed toward a method and apparatus for pointing troposcatter antennas. More particularly, the present disclosure is directed toward exchanging location information between user terminals as a basis to point troposcatter antennas at each other.
2. Introduction
Troposcatter communications use the lower atmosphere, or troposphere, as a basis to establish communications between troposcatter terminals. These communications go beyond traditional line of sight communications, which are limited to certain distances because of the curvature of the earth. In addition, line of sight communications can be degraded or blocked by structures or other barriers, for example, mountains, hills, etc. Troposcatter communications utilize these barriers as an advantage by diffracting the troposcatter signals over these barriers and bounce a signal off of the troposphere, thus improving communications. For military applications, troposcatter communications sites are established with pre-determined locations based on a specific mission, to extend communications to distant sites that extend beyond the main operations centers.
Presently, operators are used to point troposcatter antennas. An operator, using previous knowledge of approximate latitude and longitude location of a distant end terminal, manually points their troposcatter antenna in the general direction of the distant end terminal to begin working a communications link. This manual operator process is very slow. For example, an operator takes from 1 hour to days to manually establish a communications link using an AN/TRC-170.